The Sign of Jonah by Boeli van Leeuwen

Author:Boeli van Leeuwen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023269
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

Later that afternoon we went deeper into the jungle in our Land Rover, and suddenly I saw a beam of light in the distance, like a projector illuminating a stage from above. Inside the circle of light stood a bungalow built from thin tree trunks. In a big circle around the bungalow all trees and bushes had been hacked away. It seemed as if nature had been pushed back by a giant hand. Flowers were blooming in beds and smoke was coming out of the chimney. The whole thing was surrounded by a low white fence where birds sat preening their feathers. In the rocking chair on the porch sat a little woman, thin and light like a small bird, but also gnarled like the trunk of a tree. Rough shoes on a small child’s feet under a habit white as snow, with blue trim on the hem and the sleeves. The head, pushed to one side by a rheumatic neck, looked like a bust that has been lying in the earth for centuries: nicked and scratched, afflicted with a color of gray chalk. Deep furrows cut through the forehead and ran from the nostrils of a huge hooked nose to the mouth. In that weather-beaten face the eyes were blank as ponds. The gnarled hand was leaning on a stick with an ivory knob.

After we had climbed the steps Juan Carlos bowed and said: “Mother Agnes, my friend and I have come to visit you and ask for your blessing.” And to my amazement he knelt down before her. She put her hand on his shiny head and said in a grumpy voice: “God bless you, señor Altamarino, and keep you always close to His heart.” She then extended her hand and I gave her mine. Her hand was heavy, not a trace of the shakes brought on by the old age, and charged with a strange power. She looked up, her rheumatic neck sloping stiffly, and I could see the peace of God in her eyes. She let go of my hand and made a big sign of the cross that remained hovering in the air.

The jungle had not penetrated into that house. A slender Christ hung suspended in front of a very thin ebony cross, without nails in His hands and feet. The small replica of a chapel with a sweet Virgin Mary statue stood on a table in the corner of the room. A lamp was burning, candles and vases with flowers stood on the altar. Here, in the middle of the jungle, lived somebody with an unshakable faith in the God who walked the earth as a man and then ascended to heaven.

The whole wall was covered with books, arranged on rough planks, and in improbably good condition, as if the humidity and its attendant mold had no access to the house. On an old-fashioned dresser with glass sliding doors stood portraits of a man and a woman in a long skirt, and children with bootees on their feet.

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